The Voyage of the Space Beagle
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Voyage of the Space Beagle (1950, Canada) is a classic novel of science fiction by A. E. van Vogt in the space opera subgenre.
The novel is a compilation of four previously published SF stories:
- "Black Destroyer" (appeared in the July, 1939, issue of Astounding magazine—the first published SF by A. E. Van Vogt) (chapters 1 to 6)
- "War of Nerves" (May, 1950, Other Worlds magazine) (chapters 9 to 12)
- "Discord in Scarlet" (December, 1939, Astounding magazine—the second published SF by A. E. Van Vogt) (chapters 13 to 21)
- "M33 in Andromeda" (August, 1943, Astounding magazine, later published as a story in the book M33 in Andromeda (1971)) (chapters 22 to 28)
The book was republished in 1952 under the title Mission: Interplanetary.
An exploratory space journey on a scientific mission encounters several, largely hostile, aliens and alien civilisations. Meanwhile on board, revolutions, both political and scientific, take place.
The book was translated in several languages and, as is the case for most of van Vogt's work, was very popular in France. In Japan it is noted that Korita, the character who explains the demise of the first monster, is Japanese, and presented without racist slights.
A sentient panther-like species named Coeurl (or Zorl in French editions), with psi capabilities and tentacles coming out of its shoulders, was adapted as the character Mughi (or Mugi) in the anime Dirty Pair. It also appears in several versions of the Final Fantasy video game, and as the Displacer beast in the RPG, Dungeons and Dragons.
It is reasonable to assume that the book was an influence on both Star Trek and Alien (for the latter, one section of the book is particularly resonant—indeed, Van Vogt initiated a lawsuit against 20th Century Fox for plagiarism. Fox settled out of court[1]).
The title of the book is a reference to Charles Darwin's five year voyage around the world on The Voyage of the Beagle.
[edit] Plot details
The book can be roughly divided into four sections corresponding to the four short stories on which it was based.
In the first section, the Space Beagle lands on a largely deserted desolate planet. Small scattered herds of deer-like creatures are seen, and the ancient ruins of cities litter the landscape. Coeurl, an intelligent and vicious cat-like carnivore with tentacles approaches the ship, pretending to be a dumb animal, and quickly infiltrates the ship. The creature kills several crewmen before being tricked into leaving the now spaceborne ship in a lifeboat, and is then killed.
In the second part, the ship is almost destroyed by telepathic contact with a race of bird-like aliens, called Riim. The benign signals they send are incompatible with the human mind. Only the knowledge of telepathic phenomena of two of the crewmen save the ship from madness.
In the third section, the ship comes across the Ixtl, a devil-like being floating in deep space. It is the vicious sole-survivor of a race that ruled over and destroyed an entire galaxy. It takes over the ship, kidnapping several crew members in order to implant parasitic eggs, before being eventually defeated, at the cost of great casualties among the crew, both in lives lost and morale lost.
In the last section, Anabis, a galaxy-spanning consciousness, is encountered. Once again, it is both malevolent and aggressive, and under all circumstances must be prevented from following the ship back to any other galaxy. The crew of the Space Beagle is brainwashed into spending several years luring the intelligence to starve on a wild goose chase into deep space.
Running concurrently to this, the book also concerns a power struggle in the ship among the leaders of individual scientific groups.
The main character of the novel is Dr. Elliott Grosvenor, the only Nexialist on board (a new discipline depicted as taking an actively generalist approach towards science). He is eventually forced to take control of the ship using a combination of hypnotism, psychology, brainwashing and persuasion, in order to develop an effective strategy for defeating Anabis.
